Red Spectacles and Reading Minds

Rykah got a pair of Calvin Klein deep wine (red) glasses. She can now actually see half the world she could not before. She loves them. And she looks adorable in them, truth be told. Thank the gods that somewhere between her father and my genetics, she got a blend that is nothing like either of us.

Last night she came into my room and sat on my legs facing me and said very seriously to me, "Mom, I'm going to tell you something about me that you don't know." Sure this was going to be some major revelation, I was appropriately serious. "What is it, honey?" I ask in my best you-can-tell-me-anything voice.

"My favorite candy flavors are blue rasberry and sour apple," she says with great sincerity. I pause. "Wow," I say, while searching for what to actually SAY. "Cool. I'll keep that in mind." Then she wandered off to do something else. You realize that when she decides to tell me something of monumental import, she will probably mention it, in passing, while running out the door to play someday.

Off and on for -- well, her whole life -- I have always tried to make psi seem like a normal, no-brainer, no-big-deal kind of thing. We live many lives, we 'sit in on' other identities when we dream, we leave our bodies when we sleep and sometimes when awake, when people die it's only their body that dies of course, dreaming things that happen is pretty common, deja vu is our memory of future-awareness, and being deliberately psychic like in remote viewing is just another normal thing, it just takes more work to get the hang of for some people... like mom.

The other day, enthused after overhearing me talking to my tasker about a kind of data I've gotten a couple times that I think is cool (a graphic icon that is representative of the primary form+dynamic of the target), she decided SHE wanted to do RV. "Naw, it'll bore you, it's more an adult thing," I told her offhandedly, which was sure to make her insist she absolutely had to do it right this moment and nothing I could ever say or do would change that.

She wanted to start with my envelope target pool. I didn't think that was such a great idea. It was a pool of nearly 1000 that I made back in 2000, there are probably at least 700 left. The pool has literally everything including some pretty grim and grisly tasks here and there -- but not that many statistically, compared to the whole pool. She was upset I wouldn't just let her grab one and try and I didn't want it to be a drama so I said ok, fine, they may not be appropriate but we'll try a few.

She wrote down person or people, a few colors. The target was a gorilla. She wrinkled her nose in disgust--it took one session to make even my ten year old detest animal targets, something most of us had to do a lot of before we took that view!--and then she tried another.

blue. puffy. water. a few other things. The target is a heavily blue photo of a giant air balloon taking off over a lake and mountains. So she tried another.

A train. A... tunnel or something like that. Some other data. The target is a train, or part of one, and the destroyed stationhouse nearby (war pic). I suggested she stop but she wanted to do more. So she tried another.

She thinks it's a plane crash. A lot of blood. She sees at the other end of inside a plane a tall man, black top to bottom in black-bandages, with a long shape in his right hand, like a crutch. I think to myself, this seems like her archetype for death (with me it'd likely be a skeleton with a rifle; with some, a black hooded figure with a scythe). There are people all over she says. She thinks something bad happened there. The target is the definitely losing trench of a civil war battle. With an environment rather similar to what you might get in a plane actually: looking down a row, a fairly contained shape with high sides, toward the other end, and bodies all over the place mostly to each side. "OK, no more target pool!" I say, breathing a sigh of relief that she does not seem upset about this (her taste for violence and gore even in media is tougher than mine for sure), and I tell her she has to use the dojo from now on.

So she registers as 'Rinnie' in the dojo, and does a session. I tell her not to make it public unless she feels it is worth looking at, as otherwise it mostly just dilutes the list of what people wade through and then sessions that could really get useful input are more likely to get missed. She's delighted that she gets a couple colors right at least, and posts it, and is more delighted that she gets some comments on it. "Valentines," is what my buddy Eric once called RV Galleries "comments" on a session, and I agree, they feel like that. ;-) So she does another.

She gets a few points close enough and she posts that. She gets a few more comments and she's delighted. That seemed to pretty much exhaust her interest in the subject, so whether or not we will see her after this, who's to say. I have no interest in pushing or frankly even encouraging her to psi, given how it messes with the stability of pretty much everybody on some level eventually. She'll choose it on her own or she won't. No matter to me really.

Which reminds me that when I began in RV I was the product evangelist, but now I am completely UNevangelistic about the topic. (My web work is based on providing options for people already interested, more than recruiting new folks.) In fact I recall that many years ago, I argued fiercely with a couple friends who felt that probably only about 1/2 of 1% of the population was all that appropriate for it. Now I think that number might be a little high. "There is nothing like working HARD for a living to make a man a conservative," is a political saying; it sort of applies to RV too I think. I get less willing to assume on people -- or on any part of the process -- by the day.

Sometimes she tells me that I know nothing of her life or perspective, that I can't possibly understand what it's like to be her. I try not to giggle over that, because I'm sure she is right, but that usually only comes up in moments of angst, like why I won't let her wear makeup to school for 5th grade, even though most the kids in her class do. The generations -- and their bodies -- get older when younger, by the year.

But it's another day in suburbia. School pictures came out, progress reports came out, and they both went well for her in my opinion. Someday she'll look back on this and I wonder what she will think, of her mom who spent her whole waking life outside work and kid on RV for a dozen years before the kid decided to try it, and probably for a dozen more years at least after.

She got glasses so she can see the world around her, finally... and she got a dojo login so she can see, well, the world that is not around her, too. Maybe by the time she is 21 she'll be doing 'deep mind probes' (...that term makes me laugh out loud) the way most of us sing in the shower.